A botanical extract is an herbal or product ingredient with desirable flavor, aroma, or nutritive quality that is removed from the tissue of a plant, usually by treating it with a solvent, to be used for a particular purpose. Botanical extracts have been used as a source of medicine throughout history and continue to serve as the basis for many pharmaceuticals, cosmeceuticals, and nutraceuticals today.
Solvent extractions of essential oils have occurred for centuries. Most early applications employed the use of commonly available oils like olive oil and vegetable oils, based on direct contact of the oil with the plant material or seeds of the desired essential oil. These were used in early medicine, food enhancements, and preservatives. This process was very inefficient and only a minor portion of the plant's compounds were transferred to the oil carrier. Steam stripping was later used and proved to be far more efficient. Steam extractions are widely used today. However, the high temperatures of the steam stripping cycle will damage some of the targeted compounds.
The phytochemical composition of many plants has changed over time, with domestication of agricultural crops resulting in enhanced content of some bioactive compounds and diminished content of others. Plants continue to serve as a valuable source of therapeutic compounds because of their vast biosynthetic capacity. Due to modern breakthroughs in science, technology, and engineering, global markets are just now adopting and have a deeper awareness of the medicinal, therapeutic, and alternative-energy applications, to name a few uses of botanical extracts. Valuable botanical extracts include chamomile, dandelion, echinacea, marigold, lavender, cannabis, hemp, and many other therapeutic plants and herbs that organically grow in our ecosystem.
The problem that currently exists in botanical extraction processing is that typical manufacturing methods are limited in capacity, capability, and consistency. Present systems are generally small, single-batch, mixed-phase solvent systems designed and operated for small throughputs. Existing customer pains include slow processing times, inconsistent output quality and yield, low volume capability, high cost, and logistical expense. The increased demand in processing capabilities for botanical extractions is proving that existing technologies are not only incapable of handling the volume but they are also unsustainable processing solutions.
Prior art would have the operator manually fill the extraction vessel, rinse the plant material, and then wait to remove excess solvent via evaporation, pressure to squeeze the residual retained in the biomass, spinning, or other mechanical processes to remove the remaining solvent. Then the operator manually removes content from the extraction vessel, exposing the operator to risk of contact with residual solvent being exposed to environment, at the same time losing valuable high-quality laboratory or food-grade solvents. Then the operator manually refills it to repeat the action.
Because the market dependency and growth for botanical extraction is rapidly expanding, there is an immediate need for larger-scale solutions of high efficiency processing. In view of the prior art, problems include material handling, distillation time, recovery of solvent, and removal of the extract from the machine. There is a desire for removal of target compounds from plant materials without damage to the compounds, and at high yields.